Lifestyle and Art Magazine

Five more reasons to NOT go to a festival

Hi, just in case festival promoters and attendees worldwide needed another reason to hate us, we’ve created a second part of our tawdry anti-event love to follow up our first sickening lack of support for creative endeavours. Although you have your hatership ready to go, part of you agrees with everything we’re saying here.

1. No fucks given about social life

Really, who are these people you think you like that you feel you have some sort of bond with? How often do you hang out with them when you aren’t drunk or high? How do they serve you generally in your every-day life? If you weigh it up, what possible purpose could there be for other humans except to provide you with sex, money or other resources?

Are you so incredibly insecure as you need affirmation? Perhaps you should consider the fact you won’t be popular no matter what you do or how much you try to please others, and everyone will forget about you in a couple of months’ time when you leave the area. Choose the life of a monk because life is pain and we all die alone so it’s best to eliminate all worldly connections as falsehoods. Alternatively, walk your fucking dog instead of relying everyone else to look after it.

2. Too much effort

Let’s weigh this up logistically for those who don’t understand the whole deal of what’s required. Sometimes it’s really hard to do regular things like wash and eat.

You have to first purchase your expensive ticket, you have to clear a good chunk of time for the whole deal, you have to be well-prepared for camping at the festival, you have to purchase everything you need for the festival, you have to liaise with the other people you’re camping with, you have to figure out transport logistics there and back, then you have to do the whole thing – which is always a cross-country marathon and test for your psychological endurance.

Instead, you could just give it all the flick, kick back with a bottle of tequila, mash the shuffle button on your music system and drink yourself into a stupor with no fucks given, no extra steps taken.

3. Sobriety

You’re trying to clean up your act after an adult’s lifetime on screaming it up the walls, and have decided to give up the booze and drugs because of health, work or just that you’re a god-awful asshole when you’re wasted. Either way, it’s valuable and admirable you are going straight.

You have the idea that you could possibly do the festival sober, no sweat. Now, are you being honest with yourself? Do you really think you can do a whole run outside non-stop for 3-4 days of watching your friends bonding with each other on a munted tangent that you can’t relate with at all? From personal experience, you will have a certain disconnect and it’s difficult to endure.

Seriously, you should examine how much you really value your festival experience and measure it against your potential of crumbling your clear-headedness in a fuck-it moment. Is it worth it?

4. Queues

We’re off on our magical journey away from mainstream society, away from the pressures of our every-day existence, where you will soar like an eagle with zero worries given. BA-BOWM, WRONG.

At any well-populated festival, there are a zillion people with the same idea as you. They – like you – need a drink, a crap, and need to get into the frikkin thing to begin with. The beginning of your free-balling experience will involve you trying to get a park as close as possible to the gate, where you will find a less-than-ideal spot that effectively turns your car into a mobile oven.

Then you will spend time in a queue at the gate, where you may even be searched by cops. Then you will urgently need to pee, where you will join a cohort of rather anxious people. You will get in an awkward conversation will a guy who has double-dropped and is starting to smell.

5. Toilets

Your reward for managing the queue – a sweat tent of a chemical bog with piss and toilet paper everywhere. Congratulations, a winner is you.

Now you must somehow make sure your bag or purse isn’t draped in a wet spot. You may need to wipe someone else’s urine or other excrement off and layer the toilet paper up on the seat so your ass isn’t polluted by a foreign stench. That is, if you have remembered toilet paper? If not, perhaps there is a suspiciously moist roll there for you.

You will be sweltering in this box of various odours and will feel extremely vulnerable to all the noises adjacent to you, and some person will inevitably rap impatiently on your cubicle just when you have made to make a movement you haven’t been manage due to performance pressures.

If you are at a doof, there might not even be that luxury of chemie bogs and you must mount an expedition into the bush with a shovel, where other mounds of paper lay under trees on the way.

Written by Kristian Hatton, who is decaying with misery, computer games and extra money/time as we speak.